


the butterfly effect

by prettydizzeed



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, post 3x03, very brief mention of canonical suicide attempt, wooing via mourning ritual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-20 22:19:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14270736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: Raphael calls Magnus the instant the nursing home hangs up. “It's an emer—” he says, and a portal is already opening in his room, sharper than sunlight but still gentle.





	the butterfly effect

**Author's Note:**

> as if raphael would ever call isabelle before magnus and as if magnus would ever let him call isabelle smfh

Raphael calls Magnus the instant the nursing home hangs up. “It's an emer—” he says, and a portal is already opening in his room, sharper than sunlight but still gentle, familiar, comforting the way mornings used to be, with their brightness and consistency. Magnus bursts through with fire in his palms, unholy but glorious, and extinguishes it the second he sees Raphael and realizes this kind of crisis cannot be burnt by anything other than the sting of whiskey in his throat. As the fire smoothly retreats along his lifelines, a glass of water materializes in its place. A study in contrasts, his friend.

“She's dead,” Raphael says, and he knows he is dead, too, with so much more certainty than before. The last thing keeping him alive, the ray of light connecting him to his past self, is gone, and he had lied to her. He'd told her that her brother had come back to say goodbye.

He used to think vampires couldn't cry. Maybe they aren't meant to, maybe this is as much an act of defiance of fate as the cross around his neck, because every sob tears something out of him that feels vital. Like an organ. Or his humanity.

It feels like internal bleeding. It feels like watching the sunrise from a park bench, the red-orange agony two seconds before Magnus appeared in his wisps of color and snapped, “Do you have a death wish?” 

They were already in his apartment by the time he'd finished the sentence. Raphael hadn't answered, and Magnus had looked at him the same way he is looking at him now.

Magnus rubs his back and refills his water glass and hums softly, and Raphael lets his grief crash over him like a solar flare.

*

“I wanted to call her,” Raphael says, and grimaces. It is four in the afternoon. The water was replaced with blood when his body revolted against its intrusion, and now his tears are red, like Christ before His death. His tear ducts ache as if they've been doused with acid.

“You did,” Magnus says, “Twice a week.”

“Not her. Not Rosa. I meant—I still want to tell—I hate myself, sometimes.” He means it.

Magnus presses his lips together. “You should try to get some rest.” Raphael nods; he would normally resist being taken care of, but it's late, and it's Magnus, and his throat is the texture of a gravel road.

“Take my phone with you,” he says, looking away.

Magnus smiles, barely, gently. “Who said I'm going anywhere?”

He tucks Raphael’s phone into his back pocket, wraps his arms around him, and pretends to sleep for the rest of the day.

*

Raphael wakes up to the ache of emptiness in his chest, like the first months of adjusting to not needing to breathe, and the soft sound of Magnus’s voice at the door.

“I’ve never seen that symbol before,” Magnus is saying. He sounds like he always does when his concern has outweighed his wariness.

“I am not aware of its meaning,” someone responds. Raphael struggles to place the voice. “I have not been allowed to attend state meetings ever since the incident with Clary Fairchild.”

It’s Meliorn. Raphael isn’t sure why he smiles at the realization.

“May I see him?” Meliorn asks, and Raphael pretends not to know why he continues to smile.

“I don’t know if he’s awake,” Magnus starts, and Raphael stumbles out of bed.

“I’m up,” he calls, and winces at both his eagerness and the pain in his throat. Magnus subtly lifts a finger in his direction, and Raphael’s hair smooths back, and his mouth tastes no more like death than usual. Raphael glances at him, and Magnus nods, accepting the silent thank you.

Meliorn extends a hand. In it rests a gossamer string of silk butterflies.

“I figured you did not have much use for a sheer curtain,” he says. “I hope this will suffice.”

“It’s beautiful,” Raphael says. He reaches out even though he is afraid to touch it; he feels like he can never wash the dirt of his own grave out from beneath his fingernails, most days. And now all of his family will have been beneath the ground, and he will be the only one to have reemerged in a mockery of the resurrection.

The butterflies are heavier than he expected, weighed down with grief, and surreally soft. He wonders what kind of magic is woven in; the pattern is intricate, and they glisten like tears. Meliorn must have been up all night, as well.

“When is the funeral?” Meliorn asks, and Raphael is grateful that he is always so direct. It feels like small talk would shatter his eardrums right now.

“During the day,” Raphael says, and his voice does not break, and his eyes do not close, but it feels like the butterflies in his hand grow heavier.

“I am sorry,” Meliorn says. To shrug it off seems like an insult, but Raphael doesn’t know what to say. “Would it be inappropriate to offer to attend in your place?”

Raphael hears Magnus, in the other room, drop something—a teacup, probably—swear, and hastily magic it back together. Raphael barely refrains from rolling his eyes; Magnus has never been a subtle eavesdropper.

“I’d appreciate that,” Raphael says, and Meliorn nods.

*

Magnus portals him to the cemetery entrance the instant it’s dark. Raphael has spent the day drinking when Magnus handed him mugs of blood, staring at the butterflies on his curtain rod as they swayed back and forth, and remembering. He slept, at least a little, but he’s not sure when.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Magnus asks. Raphael shakes his head.

“Okay,” Magnus says, looking at him so gently it hurts. “I’ll be here when you’re ready to go back.”

Raphael winds through the clusters of headstones, along the overgrown and at times nonexistent path, until he reaches his family’s plot. It hurts to be here, not only from the loss of his parents and the reminder of his Transformation, but in the air itself. The sheer quantity of crosses was enough to make him pass out the first time he tried to visit his family’s graves.

Rosa’s is easy to find; it’s uncomfortably bright, too recent, the stone too new. He holds his flowers in front of himself like an offering as he walks closer and lays them down. It takes him a moment to find a space where they will fit; he was expecting her grave to be empty, but there is an antique cross he remembers from one of Magnus’s many redecorations, and a pot of shimmering, slightly eerie flowers that are unmistakably Seelie.


End file.
